Tuesday, March 29, 2005

Well I am in Spokane for the week on work bullshit. Not sure why I am here other than to make sure the wheels don't fall off this circus. For the non-locals Spokane is just under 300 miles from Seattle, and is almost in Idaho. 300 miles is a long drive in a car.

This is the fricking desert and given that we have been in a drought since January you would expect spring in the desert to be warm right? Wrong. It snowed today, then it hailed, and then there was a bit of sleet, then a downpour and then more snow. Oh yeah and it was windy as hell too. Not great weather for field work.

On the plus side I convinced the crew that the Best Western down by the highway was crappy and full of nasty truckers (literally there was a truck stop attached to the hotel), and I got them to switch to a Holiday Inn in the city center(these have gotten a lot better than I remember!) . We can actually walk to restaurants and there is a natural foods market not too far away. Things are going better than expected.

I just bought this book about an autistic kid solving a dog murder mystery, and it is pretty good. I read about 140 pages of it last night, and would have read more, but I knew I had to get some sleep. The book is called The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Timeand it is written from the perspective of a rain-man type character, which I understand is an extrremely rare sort of savant autistic and does not really reflect at all the reality of this terrible behavioural and developmental disability, but whatever.

The bad part of the book is that I was starting to note a lot of simularities between me and the autyistic kid and that is a bit diconcerting. I guess that is like how in med school students become convinced they have all of the nasty diseases they learn about.